Several have complained that standards are not what they used to be, that grades are meaningless, that rank orderings are meaningless, etc.
Grades are fundamentally a measurement question. They are unambiguously an ordinal scale evaluation of students who attended a class. They eclectically represent what each teacher wants them to mean, generally related to accomplishment on testing and production of work for a course. It is presumed by most that such accomplishment and production is related to understanding of the material, at least on a rank order. That is, persons who get an A in the course should be able to have a superior conversation on the topic of the course than someone who gets a lower grade. That someone who has such a conversation with all the students from a class would generate a rank ordering of the students which has a reasonably high correlation with the grades the students were given. (This might be an interesting study of grading, it must have been done by someone, right?) That doesn't mean a C student in my class would be equal to a C student from Herman's class, or Dennis'. All our tests are simply samples from an infinite supply of relevant questions which may be asked of students. With a given test, I may hit a 'B student' in the heart of their well learned information and/or style of questioning such that he/she scores an A on that test. Therefore, all our grading is necessarily only an estimate of some 'true grade' for a student. Hence the reason we have multiple methods of evaluation (I do tests approximately every 3 chapters, 10 minute quizes once per week, and they do small group projects of their own design (with lots of guidance)). But, even with all that we know there is a certain amount of error in our estimation of grades. Hence, I'm never worried about raising or lowering a grade for a given student after all my number crunching if I believe it is a better representation of my estimate of achievement in the course. I know that reasonable (and unreasonable <grin>) people here will disagree with this assessement of grading. I don't claim my thinking about grading is perfect. But, I'm very confident that nobody here has a perfect understanding of grading. Paul . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
